Class Four: Those Who Survive (15 page)

‘HE WAS AN ENDANGERED SPECIES, HOW COULD YOU DO THAT? WHEN FATHER FOUND HIM, HE WAS EATING SCRAPS OUT OF

BINS BEHIND LA COSTINA. MAYBE THE ODD DOG OR CAT HERE

OR THERE,

BUT HE WAS GOOD PEOPLE, MISUNDERSTOOD.

AND YOU COME IN HERE, AND YOU CARRY OUT THE CRUDEST OF LOBOTOMIES. I HATE YOU. WHY DON’T YOU PEOPLE JUST ADMIT THE TRUTH AND DIE ALREADY?

FINE, I NORMALLY SAVE PEARL FOR LARGER GROUPS, BUT YOU’VE LEFT ME NO CHOICE.

PEARL MANTICE WAS A REAL HIT WITH THE MENFOLK, BY THE TIME THEY FOUND OUT ABOUT HER AFFLICTION, IT WAS TOO LATE. I SAVED HER FROM INVESTIGATION.

HOWEVER, SINCE SHE CHANGED, WELL…LET’S SAY OLD HABITS DIE HARD.

UNLIKE YOU, YOU WILL ALL DIE EASY. LADIES AND GENTLEMEN, BOYS AND GIRLS, I GIVE YOU THE PRAYING MANTIS.’

“For the love of…” Francis moaned. He looked across to the chair corral on the other side of the Big Top. Two men stood wearily behind the flimsy barricade; an older woman cowered behind them. It was located between the remains of Hugh and Shirley and the hole that Zena was trying to make.

Francis bounded over to them. “Hey, guys, look. We have no idea how many more freaks of nature our host has for us. We have to work together now, or we’re all going to end up like these poor souls.” A wiry arm swept around the blood-stained circle of death that they were all inhabitants of, as if the point needed further labouring.

One of the men stood forward. He was tall and thin; a San Andreas baseball cap kept a mop of greasy hair in check. “Man, me and Chris here, we ain’t fighters. We’re just looking after our mum, ya hear? She’s all we got left now,” he stammered.

Francis placed a conciliatory hand on his shoulder. “Slim, look, let me lay this out to you. Everyone else in this chamber is either dead or dying. If you don’t help now, then you, your brother,
and
your mum are going to die.”

Chris comforted his mother and took a step forward so that he was standing by the other man’s side. He was the same height, but his metabolism worked a little slower, adding a bit of filler to his frame. “Okay, pal. Me and Russ can help out, but we’re not leaving our mum, deal?” He offered a hand to Francis who gratefully shook it.

“Good choice, pilgrim. I’ve got a plan. Zena is trying to get out the way we come in, but I got a sneaky feeling our friend here hasn’t made it that easy. I’m going to see what lies beyond there.” Francis nodded towards the parted curtains. “Don’t point, don’t point, there’s a camera on the rail, he’s watching us. I’m going to have to sneak around the side and under it to avoid him seeing me, which means…”

Russ pulled his cap off by its peak and ran his fingers through his slick hair. “You need us to keep this Praying Mantis busy, huh?”

Francis nodded glumly. “Afraid so, slim. You’ve seen pictures of lion tamers, yeah? Grab some chairs, keep her attention on you and keep her at bay. Hopefully that’ll give me or Zena enough time to get us all a way out of here. Nathan, come here.”

The child scampered across the ring to Francis. “Nate, this is Chris, Russ and their mum. I want you to stay with them, okay? They’ll keep you safe while me and Zena try and find a way out of here. Stay with them, and listen to what they say.”

The spotlight flooded the butcher’s yard once more. A metallic clang sounded from beyond the parted curtains. Francis nodded and jogged back to Tabitha’s still body. He pushed himself flat against the canvas and held his breath.

Russ turned to his brother, each of them picking up a chair and holding it so the legs pointed out, towards the forbidding entrance. “Hey bro, it’ll be fine. It’s only a bird. What harm could she possibl—”

The chair legs thudded into the floor as a six foot tall, lithe woman stalked out onto the wooden stage. She was wrapped in a tatty black silk robe. The only things visible were her cue-ball eyes and a band of grey skin. She seemed to float to the middle of the stage. The robe covered her limbs, but even with it, she had a strange allure.

Her head turned slowly, across to the caterwauling of Russ and Chris. Like an automaton, she glided off the stage and made her way towards them. “Come here, you bint!” shouted Chris. The brothers had regained their poise and were banging the chair legs together.

As she got closer, her head snapped to the right. Eyes like a laser-guided missile looked to the bloody corpses from the initial attack. Ignoring the name-calling and gesticulating, she slid across the floor towards them.

“Where am I?” Shirley groaned. The words came out all slurred, with a degree of surprise. She ran a hand across her tacky face. As her eyes took in the sight that greeted her, a sheet of coagulated blood and skin, she screamed. Frantically, she started patting her face. She couldn’t work out why some of it was fine, and some of it was not open to the possibility of having salt applied to it.

“Whatsth happened to my thace?” she begged. Running a hand through her hair, she pulled out one of her husband’s shorn finger nails, pink bit and all. Shirley held her cheeks in terror. Her fingers recoiled as she touched exposed gum and teeth.

“Helpth me,” she pleaded. Looking to her left she saw two men and a couple of hidden figures gawping at her. No sounds were coming out, though they looked like they were trying to say something.

“Thank Godth, pleasth, helpth me. Theresth thomething wong with my thace, where’s my Hugh?” She tried to stand up, but something was pressing down on her legs. Flipping over, she noticed two things, each ascended the horror scale.

The first was the sight of her husband’s body, except where his lovely face should’ve been—the one she fell in love with, the dimples in the corner of his mouth, his furrowed brow and beauty mark on his temple—was a crater lined with ragged skin, a core of broken spine and a deep red meat surround.

Ordinarily that would’ve sent her into psychiatric care, if it existed, for the remainder of her days, which probably wasn’t long given the prodigious blood loss she had experienced after being peeled.

The second, though, which trumped this, was the sight of a figure bedecked in what looked like a long black satin nightie. This at first was not the cause of consternation; perhaps it was a mere hallucination brought on by a mental imbalance caused by the desolation of her world.

No.

As the apparition got to within five feet, it cast a long shadow over her. Shirley kicked off her husband’s body and stood up. Even with a slight hunch, she was looking up into the strange face of this newcomer. “Thave oo come tho elp thus?” she asked cautiously.

It was then that the mercury in the Horro-meter™ went volcanic and erupted through the top. Almost on cue, a thin ribbon parted, and Pearl stretched out her two arms, causing the black robe to slip off her dead body and float to the floor as if carried by cherubs. Shirley gulped and looked up into a mouth lined with razor-sharp needle teeth. This, though, was not the worst of it. This was reserved for what passed as ‘its’ arms.

They were bony and bent backwards at the elbow. Each hand looked like it had melted and formed a skin paddle. As they opened, the inside was lined with thick fused, jagged rows of bone. Pearl stood over Shirley, her modesty preserved by the same type of bandages as were bound around the twins.

The monster regarded Shirley as an alien might regard a giraffe. Shirley coughed and managed to squeak out, “Thello,” before the two raptorial arms snapped out and caught her around her shoulders. As she let out the first chord in her scream, the Praying Mantis closed her arms together and jerked them upwards. The motion severed through skin and bone, juddering Shirley’s body one way and her arms the other.

She slumped to the floor, blood bailing out of her body through ruptured arteries. Her arms slopped to the ground. With a gentleness her previous action belied, Pearl picked up one with her folded arm and flopped it around so she could feast on the wet end.

Shirley made a wet burbling sound as she flapped around on the ground like a beached haddock. The sawdust stuck to the gooey lines of raw flesh on her face, giving her a new texture to try out.

The thrashing subsided quickly and the only sounds were the slurping and tearing as Pearl ripped chunks of meat from Shirley’s bicep, Zena desperately trying to tear a hole through the material, and the two brothers gasping in a metaphorical soiling of underwear.

“
He
wants
us
to keep
that
at bay with
these
?” Chris whimpered, dumbstruck at the sight of Shirley bleeding to death on the floor and her vanquisher nibbling on her bingo wings.

Russ pulled his cap down. “Well, mate, not as if we have much choice, is it? Dunno about you, but between that dead bird’s screaming and our howling, it’s a wonder the whole freakshow doesn’t know we’re here.”

Chris nodded. Sweaty palms gripped the back of the chair. “Bring ‘em on. Think I’d prefer a straight fight than all this dancing around.”

The two brothers twitched as Pearl dropped the arm. Swallowing in unison, they braced themselves, only for the dead freak to pick up the other arm and start gnawing on it like a spare rib.

Zena had made a foot-wide hole in the material. It was like nothing she had seen. Perspiring with effort, she dropped the bent metal bar onto the floor and stuck her DM-covered foot into the hole. She then proceeded to pull herself up and use her weight to make the hole bigger. After several attempts, one of which nearly sent her arse over tit, a reluctant tearing sound signalled a measure of success.

With the hole made wider, she managed to pull herself up and bounced on the hole until it finally decided to allow her admittance.

She jumped off and peered through the gap into the hallway they had all made their way down, what seemed like three omnibuses of
EastEnders
ago.

“In for a penny…” she mumbled to herself, and in an act of reverse birth, clambered through the vulvic opening. Landing on the wooden walkway, she dusted herself off and felt her way down the corridor. The pitch black claimed her as its own. The only thing which offered any semblance of reality was when she looked over her shoulder to the tear back to the room of grisly death, and the voices in her head castigating her for taking a lift from a stranger.

She argued back that in the situation she was in, it wasn’t much of a choice to make. The group she was with had been devoured whilst they slept; she had only escaped as her claustrophobia meant she had slept on the caravan roof.

After moments of blind groping she reached the entrance. The flaps were covered in what felt like the same material she had just spent the best part of ten minutes fighting through. Back then she had the luxury of being able to see what she was doing and an implement of some kind. A little irked, she turned around and made her way back towards the beacon of light, guiding her way back to the budding charnel house.

Shirley’s other arm slapped her dead body on the back as it was discarded, as if it was congratulating her on having both arms ripped off at once.

Good show, old bean!

The brothers shared nervous glances and adopted the en garde pose.

Pearl kicked the cooling corpse in front of her. Seeming to lose interest, she turned to see what could be eviscerated next.

“Oh fuck! Here comes big bird! Try to stay out of range okay? Thrust and parry, okay?” Chris offered.

Russ looked at his brother with something amounting to disdain and ridicule,. “You’re joking yeah? How about we just try and keep her from eating us, Mum, or the kid, yeah? The only game plan we have is along the lines of winging it and hoping that mental man or psycho bird get back here before Insect girl here tears us apart.”

“You’re such a dick,” Chris mumbled.

Pearl stopped and looked at the cowering food. Her right arm snapped down and decapitated Shirley like a paper guillotine. With the end of one of her arms, she picked the head up by sticking the morphed fingers into the shiny meat, and brought it to her mouth like a Chupa Chups lolly.

Brain, sawdust, and blood flavour; fifth favourite in the zombie apocalypse.

“Man, she is dragging this out, huh?” Chris grumbled.

Russ turned to him. “As far as I’m concerned, she can take as long as she wants. I’d help her write an aria, ponder the vagaries of folk music or go on a sabbatical to the Ivory Coast, mate. Anything to stop her coming anywhere near us.”

Francis worked his way to the parted curtains. Casting a curt glance through them into the ether beyond, he clenched the baton tighter and stepped under the camera and into the corridor.

In the confines of the gangway, the spotlight from the room cast splinters of light onto calloused metal bars. After a few seconds, his brain deduced that they were cage doors. Looking along the length of the corridor, he guessed there were ten in total, five on each side. His mind a whirl of what abominations might be lying in wait for him, he forced down his reluctance and inched down into the belly of the unknown.

The first pair of cages, opposite each other, appeared to be empty. They had the same dimensions, but aside from some discarded newspaper and crisp bags, they held no nightmares.

As his fingers grasped the next set of bars, the door creaked open. His heart jumped up from its usual home to somewhere around his inner ear. Calming himself, he realised that this was the residence of one of the things they had been murderously introduced to recently.

He cast a furtive glance within the cages, and clocked small piles of bones within each. Pieces of rotting meat clung to them like Garra Rufa fish giving them a buff up. The next pair of cages were equally furnished. Some of the longer bones had been snapped in half in one cell, whilst the other had segments of jawbone and eye-socket lying around like modern art installations.

The next cage was firmly shut. Inside, he could hear something stir. A moan warbled out as if the owner had a cleft palate. Looking down beyond the cages, he saw a line of light like a goal frame on its side and covered with glow in the dark paint. Sticking to the middle of the walkway, Francis tiptoed towards the light…